"So Easy," The Video

"So Easy," a video for the amazing Haroula Rose, about which I wrote in my last post, is now on YouTube, officially released!  Here's a link:

So Easy [Official Music Video] - YouTube
► 3:15► 3:15	www.youtube.com/watch?v=o30BrLH0hbo

I hope readers enjoy it.  And I hope you have a look at A HARD DAY'S NIGHT and HELP, along with the Beatles' videos for "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever."  Also please seek out Haroula's music.

I'm on location in New Orleans - busy, busy, busy.  I'll write more when I come up for air.

HOW DID I GET HERE?

     When asked why I chose editing over other film crafts, I often recall my college internship at Calliope Films, a commercial production house.  There, on-set personnel arrived at work by 6 a.m.  Editors rolled in around 10.  The rest, as they say, is history.

     Of course, it’s not that simple.  Among those with a mid-morning start time at Calliope was Paul Hirsch (STAR WARS, etc.), then cutting TV spots between feature film assignments.  He was as brilliant and caring a mentor as he was an editor.  Chuck Workman, who owned the company, and Sonya Polonsky, a protégé of Thelma Schoonemaker’s, also helped guide me into post-production.

     But something more than a few extra hours of sleep each day and generous teachers had already drawn me to editing.  A few weeks ago, while preparing to direct a music video for singer/songwriter Haroula Rose, I realized what it was:  my passion for rock music exposed me to the editorial process before I even knew a name for it, and it tantalized me. 

     Haroula’s song “So Easy” (which, like our video, will be out in late April) is filled with allusions to early Beatles tunes.  So I began to study A HARD DAY’S NIGHT and HELP!, along with promotional shorts the band made for such records as “Strawberry Fields,” “Penny Lane” and “Hello, Goodbye.”  The hours flew by as I surfed across dozens of YouTube clips.  I discovered that director Richard Lester was a true groundbreaker. And I realized that the Beatles themselves, in order to avoid touring to promote new singles, invented the music video.

     Then, while viewing a film segment aired by Ed Sullivan in August1964, I remembered my first childhood experience of motion picture cutting.  I had seen the clip, in which “the boys” performed “You Can’t Do That,” when it was broadcast.  And I’d noticed, young as I was, that they’d played in the same auditorium wearing the same suits, and had been filmed in exactly the same style in the movie A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, which I’d seen a few weeks earlier.  Twice.  But “You Can’t Do That” wasn’t in the film.

     So, not yet a teenager, not knowing anything about filmmaking -- just watching “The Ed Sullivan Show” -- I discovered that scenes could be deleted from motion pictures (and reused elsewhere).  And the epiphany affected me deeply.  Later, of course, I would fall in love with cinema per se.  But rock’n’roll films were my gateway drug.

     On occasion, popular songs themselves heightened my fascination with editing.  About a year after Ed Sullivan ran the lifted sequence from A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, The Rolling Stones had a chart-topping hit with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”  At 3 minutes and 44 seconds, though, the song was at least a minute too long for top-40 AM play.  In addition, its third verse was thought to be “racy.”  So pop stations simply excised it.  I’d listen to the 45 rpm vinyl disc on my phonograph and compare it to what I heard on the radio.  Everything sounded identical except, of course, the length.

     Yet my pre-teen, pre-editing soul knew the truncated version wasn’t the same as the longer one.  The cut made by radio engineers was seamless, to be sure; verse three wouldn’t be missed if you didn’t know it existed.  But the abbreviated rendition of  “Satisfaction” seemed to respect authority while the longer one challenged it.  And, of course, deleting lyrics laced with sexual innuendo made the song less “hot.”  (Whatever that meant to a pre-teen.)

     A year and a half hence, during a January 1967 appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the hot, sexy Stones taught another editing lesson.  CBS demanded that they change their line “let’s spend the night together” to “let’s spend some time together.”  Mick Jagger seemed to acquiesce.  But before he got to the words in question, the Stones’ front man belted out much more prurient lyrics which were on their record, somehow unnoticed by the censor:  


"I'm going red and my tongue's getting tired/I'm out of my head and my mouth's getting dry/I'm hi-hi-high…"

Those lines, it seemed, were ok with network standards and practices.   The Stones had, as requested, redacted the far less suggestive lyric, and the corporate beast was satisfied. 

     At the time there was no MPAA.  But nowadays, during ratings negotiations with that body, I occasionally think of Mick's ostensible capitulation to CBS.  And following his lead from the sixties, I’ll swap out marginally “offensive” words that irk MPAA board members in order to keep whole sequences that one would have thought far more vulnerable to bowdlerization.

     Once more in 1967, AM radio’s time constraints provided a potent demonstration of how a song could be dramatically altered by a seamless cut.  The Doors’ “Light My Fire” ran for 7 minutes on the band’s eponymous album; the 45 rpm single was under 3 minutes.  Eliminating its 4-minute instrumental section transformed the piece from a dark, brooding taste of early rock/jazz fusion to a mere pop tune.  This huge difference made me forever circumspect when, as a cutter, I’ve had to consider deleting scenes of substance from movies.

     I’m sure I couldn’t articulate these ideas about editing back in 1967.  I didn’t even conceive of them as such.  But later, rock documentaries like MONTEREY POP, WOODSTOCK and GIMME SHELTER introduced me to important filmmaking techniques – ways of assembling visual material that are mainstays in any editor’s bag of tricks.

     Watching D.A. Pennebaker’s cinema verite record of the Monterey Pop festival, for instance, I discovered what I eventually came to know as the “reaction cut-away.” During Janis Joplin’s life-changing performance of “Ball and Chain” (my life, that is), Pennebaker and editor Nina Schulman cut to a close-up of Mama Cass Elliot, mesmerized.  It jolted me.  The juxtaposition of shots made it clear that an accomplished singer was as moved as I –- perhaps to an even greater extent -- by Janis’s intensity.  So I felt more.  Heard through new ears, saw through new eyes.

     Such cut-aways were used later in MONTEREY POP, to achieve a similar effect.  In the middle of a stirring Ravi Shankar raga, the filmmakers inserted shots of guitar giants Mike Bloomfield and Jimi Hendrix, listening.  Their awestruck faces suggested that their music –- their focus and intention -- would somehow be transformed by the experience.  Viewers saw that the concert was momentous.  A sea change was occurring in the world of popular music.

     Years later, in college, I read Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form, in which the Soviet director and theoretician wrote:  “From the collision (of two shots) a concept arises.”  I understood Eisenstein’s point –- that joining two shots adds something to a viewer’s experience not inherent in either image alone –- because I’d felt the power of such juxtapositions while watching musical performance footage. 

     Still more editing lessons were gleaned from movies that used popular songs as underscore.  A rendition of “Mrs. Robinson” on THE GRADUATE soundtrack which differed from the one on Simon and Garfunkle’s “Bookends” album made me aware that there could be different takes and different mixes of the same song or, by extension, the same shot or scene. WOODSTOCK’s split screens and staccato cutting showed me that flamboyant editing could be entertaining in and of itself.

     When I began to work in the film industry and continued to view rock’n’roll movies, they augmented and reiterated what I learned on the job.  The fact that performance quality is a preeminent filmmaking concern, for example, is obvious in Martin Scorcese’s THE LAST WALTZ, Hal Ashby’s LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE ROLLING STONES and Jonathan Demme’s STOP MAKING SENSE (which features song lyrics from which this post takes its title).  The vital importance of rhythm and precision in editing is something  I also discovered and rediscovered while viewing these documentaries.

     Certainly, all popular art is informed by material from other art forms.  For me, it’s been a blast to be reminded, during a current project, of the enormous impact rock music has had on my own work.

       

    

THE 2012 A.C.E. EDDIE AWARDS

  The A.C.E. Eddie Awards give film and television editors the opportunity to recognize their colleagues’ excellence, and to be acknowledged in return.  For practitioners of “the invisible art” – a pursuit that viewers and, for that matter, most people who work in film production don’t really comprehend – such an evening is delightful, perhaps even essential. 

   Listening to presenters and recipients’ insights and anecdotes at this year’s ceremony, I was reminded of a concert I attended as a young teenager.  The great Ravi Shankar played sitar, accompanied by tabla player, Allah Rakha.  During their performance, the maestros occasionally shared a smile.  When asked why, Pandit Ravi Shankar said they did so at moments when a more knowledgeable audience would have applauded.

   Presenting the 2012 Golden Eddie for career achievement in directing to Alexander Payne, Reese Witherspoon recalled asking him what part of filmmaking he liked best.  She thought it was a rhetorical question; surely his response would be, “working with actors.”  So she was deflated when Mr. Payne said he liked editing above all.

    A room full of editors smiled the Ravi Shankar smile; we’ve all heard the same thing from directors.  The set is chaotic, the cutting room serene.  During principal photography, momentous decisions must be made in front of a large crew while, during post-production, bold experiments can be conducted in private.  When cast and crew complete a scene, they don’t return to it, whereas a director can re-visit each and every moment of a story ad nauseam in the edit bay.  Problematic moments disappear.  Great moments are unearthed or even manufactured. 

     Ms. Witherspoon described such an editorially fabricated motif in ELECTION.  She was surprised, upon viewing the film for the first time, to see freeze frames of her goofiest, most awkward facial expressions peppered throughout.  Together, Alexander Payne and editor Kevin Tent, A.C.E. had combed footage for the actress’s silliest looks, some lasting only a tiny fraction of a second.  Then they froze these shots and lingered on them during dialogue scenes, thereby establishing the story’s comical tone and, at the same time, commenting on Ms. Witherspoon’s character.

     During his acceptance speech, Mr. Payne spoke not just about creating humorous moments during post-production, but about Mr. Tent himself -- glowingly and with great warmth and wit.  He made it clear that respect, trust and (yes) love, are cornerstones of his relationship with his editor.  This public acknowledgement of the intimate connection between director and editor made us smile the Ravi Shankar smile again.  In post-production, we’re together 50 hours or more per week for months on end, and we become as close as family.

     Clint Eastwood expressed similar high regard and affection for his cutter, Joel Cox, A.C.E., when presenting the trophy for career achievement in feature film editing.  “My theory,” Mr. Eastwood said, “is surround yourself with good people and let them make you look good.”  He continued, “If it isn’t relaxing and fun to do, there’s no reason to be doing it at my stage.” 

     The esteemed actor/director also spoke nostalgically about working with Mr. Cox, years ago, on upright moviolas.  Today, of course, they use a digital system.  For Mr. Eastwood, the newer technology provides more creative freedom.  His editor will suggest things, “and I’ll say, ‘Sure, try it.’  Now with Avid, it’s so much faster and you can put it together two or three different ways.” 

     Accepting the Eddie from his director, Mr. Cox expressed pride in editors who began their careers as apprentices and assistants in the Eastwood cutting rooms.  His remarks brought to mind how important it is to learn from masters of the craft, as Mr. Cox himself did.  The ready availability of editing software hasn’t diminished the need for traditional apprenticeship one iota.  To be sure, one can figure out which keys to hit on one’s own.  But truly understanding why to cut to a close-up, for instance, and at precisely which instant, can only come from watching and listening to accomplished directors and editors at work.

      The hundreds of decisions made in an edit suite each day require precision and subtlety, a fact acknowledged by award presenters and recipients alike.  In the world of film editing, one frame more or less – a twenty-fourth of a second – can be the difference between clarity and vagueness, between laughter and deafening silence, between rapt attention and boredom.  And only those who have toiled in cutting rooms truly get this.

      Awarding Kevin Tent the Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic) trophy for his work with Mr. Payne on THE DESCENDANTS underscored the vital and primary importance of editing precision in bringing the best of an actor’s work to the screen.  Their film is a dialogue-driven relationship drama, and that fact resulted in a huge Ravi Shankar smile.  For editors know that an engaging performance in a given scene almost never comes from an uncut recording of a single good take.  Great performances are carefully pieced together in the cutting room -- sometimes a word or two at a time -- from many different takes.  This is what Mr. Tent’s award was about.

     Of course, all the nominees in for Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic) built performances the same way.  HUGO, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, MONEYBALL and WAR HORSE showcase great acting because they were edited with precision and subtlety, combining superlative moments from an array of takes to create magical, mesmerizing performances.

     The same is true of nominees for Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy or Musical).  MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, MY WEEK WITH MARYLIN, BRIDESMAIDS and YOUNG ADULT all deserve the acclaim they’ve gotten.  In singling out the work of Anne-Sophie Bion and Michel Hazanavicius’s on THE ARTIST, A.C.E voters recognized not only the power of editing to bring out the best from actors, writers and directors, but the fact that this picture’s editors did so without dialogue and sound effects – tools on which we normally rely quite heavily.

     Documentaries, which don’t use professional actors or scripted scenes, of course, present editing challenges unlike those that arise in feature films.  Because a doc’s dramatic moments aren’t scripted, they must be created in the cutting room.  The same is true of non-fiction story structure. 

    Choosing Lewis Erskine and Aljernon Tunsil’s work on FREEDOM RIDERS for the Eddie, then, hailed them as storytellers.   Nominating David Tedeschi for LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD, and Joe Bini and Maya Hawke for CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, did the same.  Hailing their work again made us smile a` la Ravi Shankar and Allah Rakha, because we know documentary editors to be writers, not “technicians,” as the general public often sees them.

     Like non-fiction film, television makes unique demands on editors.  True, tv shows require precision in editing and performance construction just as features do, but cutting for the small screen is done with much tighter schedules, taking weeks instead of months.  Sometimes, in fact, a half hour show only has days between the end of shooting and its airdate.

     That’s why, again smiling the Shankar smile, we applaud all the television editing winners and nominees, particularly Doug Ibold, A.C.E., recipient of the career achievement Eddie for television editing. His work on MIAMI VICE was groundbreaking across all audio-visual media.  That, and his editing on such shows as MAGNUM, P.I., QUINCEY, M.E., LAW AND ORDER and LAW AND ORDER, S.V.U. have become part of the fabric of American pop culture’s history. 

     All the 2012 nominees and winners are to be congratulated!  And thanks are in order as well:  to A.C.E.’s peerless executive director, Jenni McCormick,  who produced the awards dinner, and to all who worked behind the scenes to make the evening a huge success.  Thanks, also, to the evening’s host, actor/comedian Patton Oswalt.  Mr. Oswalt seemed truly amazed at the fast pace of the presentations.  But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise; editors have no patience for scenes that go longer than they should.

     

SUNDANCE 2012

January 20, 2012

     Josh Radnor’s LIBERAL ARTS is the sixth film I’ve edited to be chosen as an Official Sundance Selection.  But screening at the festival is not something about which one becomes jaded.   This year’s trek to Park City is as exciting as my earliest sojourn to the event, first described to me in 1984 as “a thing Redford puts on where you ski all day and watch movies all night.”

     LIBERAL ARTS will have its world premiere at the Eccles Theatre, Sundance’s largest and most prestigious hall.  The venue is named after a Republican Mormon banker, George S. Eccles, and his wife, Dolores.  George, with his brother Marriner, founded The First Security Corporation in 1928.

     But the Eccles brothers were nothing like today’s higher profile Republican Mormons.  George and Dolores were most proud of their philanthropy, particularly their funding of arts programs.  Marriner, though a member of the GOP, was invited to Washington by FDR to help shape the New Deal.

     The latter Mr. Eccles, you see, had written, in his 1931 work, Beckoning Frontiers, that:  “As mass production requires mass consumption (there must be) a distribution of wealth… to provide men (sic) with buying power.”  He argued that The Great Depression was caused by concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.  Only by increasing the general population’s purchasing power could economic recovery come about.  Demand for products, not tax breaks for the obscenely wealthy, would create jobs.

     How strange to sit and watch independent cinema in a theatre funded by a family that reminds us that being Republican (and Mormon) didn’t always mean advocating greed as a socio-economic panacea!  Indeed, the fact that Marriner Eccles was a Federal Reserve Bank chairman and a participant in the Bretton Woods negotiations that led to creation of both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – a conservative c.v., to be sure – suggests how far right the political spectrum itself has shifted.  Today, Eccles would be considered ultra-liberal.  A Republican Mormon socialist!

     Perhaps in the near future Sundance will feature an independently produced documentary about the Eccles family.  Seeing it in the theatre that bears their name would be just the kind of “meta” experience for which indie films often strive.

    

     

HUGO

           This is my first post in six months.  I’ve been hard at work cutting Josh Radnor’s new movie, LIBERAL ARTS, and my intention was to write first about why it’s impossible for a feature film editor to engage in extracurricular activities such as blogging while working on a picture.  But I’m inspired, instead, to sing the praises of Martin Scorcese’s HUGO. 

           Mr. Scorcese’s new film is a profoundly moving, impeccably executed love story.   With a twist:  the love object is cinema itself.   Appreciation of the movie, indeed, may be enhanced if viewers are as passionate about motion pictures as the director.  But HUGO is so specific and detailed that its theme becomes universal; people who truly love anything will recognize their own fervor for what stirs them, and be deeply affected by the work. 

          The film’s central characters, Hugo Cabret and Georges Melies, are enthralled by the magic of filmmaking in the same way that baseball fanatics, for example, are captivated by the sport.   Thus when Hugo introduces his young friend, Isabel, to the pleasure of afternoon movie-going, the scene is so sensuous and joyful that it transcends literal content.  To be sure, the director and the actors deftly convey the heightened state we associate with viewing big screen movies in the dark.  But the scene might also evoke, depending on the viewer, memories of an early childhood trip to the ballpark, a first visit to the seashore or even a first rock concert.  Cinephiles, sports fans, beach lovers, audiophiles -- indeed, all of us who are fortunate enough to remain awestruck by things -- will feel a strong connection to HUGO.

           Martin Scorcese’s collaborators on the film, of course, contribute a great deal to this sense of magic and wonder.  Howard Shore’s brilliant hour and forty-five minute score, for instance, is deeply emotional without ever being manipulative.   The composer uses period instruments such as the ondes Martenot (an electronic keyboard invented in 1928) and the musette (a French accordion), as well as guitars and pianos from the 1920’s and ‘30’s.  But such choices never feel self-conscious; rather they lend authenticity to the movie.

           Mr. Shore is just one of many whose work on the picture seems Oscar worthy.  Bob Richardson’s 3-D camera work and lighting are astonishing, as is Dante Ferretti’s impeccably detailed production design.  Thelma Schoonemaker’s film editing is brilliant, as always.   Sandy Powell’s period costume design is inspired, and Tom Fleishman’s innovative sound mix (which keeps background dialogue low and principal dialogue relatively hot in order to enhance the effect of 3-D) feels groundbreaking. 

           Mr. Scorcese, to be sure, deserves an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.  The picture itself should also be nominated.  And Sacha Baron Cohen has to be singled out for blending bits of Jacques Tati and Peter Sellers with his own acting genius to create HUGO’s memorable Station Master.

           Such recognition, for one and all, would be a boon to the picture’s box office.  What’s unfortunate is that it may need the help.  Opening weekend turnout was not strong.  And with a film as great as this, we have to ask why.

          The answer is simple and I could see it coming from a mile away:  HUGO, which is truly a love story, was promoted as a children’s movie.  The strategy -- sell a film about a child to kids -- was based on the absurd notion that viewers only want to see stories about people like themselves.  This idea seems to have taken hold in movie marketing in recent years.  But here’s no evidence to support it.  In fact, both common sense and actual data tell us that the opposite is true. 

          When my generation fell in love with American cinema in the 1970’s, we were not Sicilian mobsters, beat cops chasing transnational drug-dealers, or satanically possessed pre-adolescent girls.  We weren’t sex-addicted Beverly Hills hairdressers, ‘30’s-era L.A. detectives, shark-obsessed marine biologists, or Bay Area policemen with a penchant for vigilante justice.  Movie-going gave us respite from our quotidian concerns.  And that respite is the very thing that draws us to fiction.

           Which is why we also loved -- and continue to love -- Italian, Swedish, French, German, Japanese and Indian cinema.  It’s why the great John Hughes, Amy Heckerling and Cameron Crowe “high school” films of the ‘80’s appealed as much to pre-teens and adults as they did to teenagers.  It’s why television viewers kept a show about Ozark Mountain yokels in Beverly Hills running for 11 years, why tens of millions of people tuned in to the travails of a Minneapolis news team each week, and why the tale of a physician falsely accused of murder drew almost all TV watchers to its final episode.

           HUGO is appealing for the same reason our favorite motion pictures and television programs become classics:  they transport us from the routines of our daily lives.  The romance of Paris in the thirties, with its beautiful train stations and cafes, the magic of the dawn of cinema, and the exciting life of a movie-loving boy who lives with a robot inside a clock -- that’s right, a movie-loving boy who lives with a robot inside a clock -- will attract adults, just as the story of Truffaut’s young Antoine Doinelle drew older viewers to THE FOUR HUNDRED BLOWS.  Kids will love HUGO, too, and should see it.  But it’s a romantic, artful film, rich in detail and profound in ways that make it a truly grown-up experience.

           So the picture’s high quality will win out over its ill-conceived marketing campaign.  People will see HUGO because of its great reviews, because of its stellar word-of-mouth and because of the award nominations it will garner.   And perhaps studio executives will move past the folly of trying to sell mirror-gazing to the public when that’s the opposite of what most filmgoers want.

     

Waiting for Comfort

June 30, 2011

     A few weeks ago I had the kind of hellish day that seemed to call for a stiff drink.   But I needed more. Something better than booze or comfort foods like mac and cheese or meat loaf.  What the doctor ordered was a comfort movie. 

     We all have such films -- dvds we’ve watched dozens of times and will watch many more, because they cheer us up or so engage us that no matter how often we view them, they provide consolation.  The content of my comfort movies is eclectic, and it’s not always lighthearted.  To wit, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, JFK, Chinatown and Dog Day Afternoon all have prominent places on my cinema of solace shelf.  But so do Bull Durham, A Room with a View and Stop Making Sense.  

     I could have watched any of these.  Yet I craved the special soothing that only a comfort comedy can provide.  Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman called out to me as it has many times before.  In fact, if Guffman were a vinyl lp, I’d have “played the grooves off it” by now.  Yet somehow I’d never viewed the “special features.”  So that night,  seeking an adult dose of comfort, I watched deleted scenes from the film, as well as its  insightful commentary track by Eugene Levy and Mr. Guest, for the first time.  And the bonus material proved to be quite healing indeed. 

     The film’s wit, warmth and intergalactic flights of imagination came across even as Levy and Guest chatted away.  But listening to their dialogue about making the movie and watching the excised material also affirmed the power and beauty of film editing.  

     Everything a lover of cinema or budding filmmaker should know about the process is here.  One just has to listen carefully.  First, the director refers repeatedly to 58 hours of raw material he ultimately turned into an 82 minute picture.  As he worked on Waiting for Guffman over a period of many many months, he and editor Andy Blumenthal created numerous iterations of the movie.  In an early one, around 10 weeks into post production, Corky St. Clair (Guffman’s protagonist, played by the writer/director) had actually become a minor character.  Producer Karen Murphy talked Guest into rethinking that choice.  Fine tuning individual scenes, reworking the order of others and dropping some altogether -- lots of careful work -- resulted in a seemingly effortless and side-splitting yet deeply affecting comedy.  

     What is likely to feel counterintuitive to non-filmmakers is the fact that Guffman was vastly improved by the deletion of a dozen or so truly great scenes.  Some were removed to enhance the flow of its story, others to make a given character or relationship less dark.  How hard to believe but true it is that one often has to take out great material in order to make the movie as good as it can be! 

     The first delightful Guffman outtake is an alternate version of Libby Mae Brown (Parker Posey)’s audition for “Red, White and Blaine,” Corky’s amateur theatre piece celebrating Blaine, Missouri’s 150th anniversary.   Posey delivers a two page monologue, speaking to a stuffed doll she holds while standing over her hospitalized brother.  He’s had a nervous breakdown and is also (inexplicably) on life support.  When Libby and the brother were younger, she tells her doll, he overpowered her and made her do things she “did not like and that made (her) sick.”  The bit is brilliant.  Brilliant!  But so is “Teacher’s Pet,” the song and dance audition that remains in Guffman.  And that  scene is much more concise and lighthearted; it also establishes that Libby can, in fact, sing and dance.

     Another fine moment which the director and editor cut from the final version shows how Ron (Fred Willard) and Sheila (Katherine O’Hara) feel when Corky quits the production.  Such a scene seemed integral to the story when Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy wrote it.  What’s more, Fred Willard and Katherine O’Hara perform the material brilliantly.  Sheila is hung over to the point of catatonia.  Ron, wiffle bat in hand, recalls two landmarks in sports history that inspire him to keep going with the show.  The first is mediocre hitter Bill Mazeroski’s game-winning homerun for the Pittsburgh Pirates in frame seven of the 1960 World Series against the Yankees.  The second is Joe Dimaggio’s batting successfully in 17 consecutive games immediately after his record breaking 56 game hitting streak was snapped.  

     Had I been editing Guffman, I confess, I might have urged Christopher Guest to leave this scene in the movie.  The Pirates upset in the 1960 series (the Yanks outscored their opponents 55-27 over the course of 7 games) is, I think, my first childhood memory of baseball in all its dramatic glory.  Willard and O’Hara give memorable performances, conveying perfectly how Ron and Sheila feel.  

     Yet as cut, going from the cast learning that Corky has quit to a shot of the group marching up to his apartment and begging him to return, the film’s final version doesn’t feel like it’s missing anything.  Viewers know exactly how the characters feel: they want their director back.

     A scene in which Corky is hospitalized after a nervous collapse was also excised from the final cut of Waiting for Guffman.  His breakdown occurred after Blaine’s town council denied a request for $100,000 to finance his one night only community theatre production.  While writing Guffman’s script, the need to show how its protagonist was affected by rejection seemed obvious to Guest and Levy.  But a simple shot of Corky brooding in his bathtub -- picked up during 3 days of post-production shooting -- addressed this dramatic requirement elegantly and succinctly.

     Again, there is much to be learned here.  First, as Woody Allen has pointed out, an audience will never miss a scene of which it was unaware.  It’s hard to imagine viewers wishing Guffman included a segment with Corky in a mental hospital without having watched that bit in a rough cut.  So if the movie feels slow to the director and editor, and one shot conveys the character’s emotional state as well as pages of dialogue might have, there’s no reason not to enhance the pace by lifting the longer scene from the picture.

     Movie buffs and budding filmmakers, by the way, should also take note of the fact that good films do indeed shoot additional material during post-production.  Although Woody Allen is most notorious for extensive “reshoots,” picking up new material while editing has always been a mainstay of high quality filmmaking.  Howard Hawks shot new scenes of Lauren Bacall during a protracted post-production period on The Big Sleep, for example, to enhance her performance and to capitalize on the the fact that To Have and Have Not made her a star while he was editing Sleep.  Robert Flaherty even reshot on the classic documentary, Nanook of the North.  (long story for another post.)

     Of course, much of Waiting for Guffman’s commentary has nothing to do with editing.  One of the joys of the play-by-play is Eugene Levy’s description of Dr Pearl’s performance of a particular joke as “Pearl doing Carson doing Gleason while delivering a Pat McCormick joke.”  It’s a wonderful “inside” moment, revealing the passion and intensity with which  a contemporary master of comedy has studied the work of great comics who came before him. 

     One more fascinating remark from Christopher Guest is that “in another context, ‘A Penny for Your Thoughts’ (a musical number he performs with Parker Posey) would be moving.”   Doesn’t he know that it is moving?  It is deeply so.  To quote Woody Allen on filmmakers and viewers seeing the same work differently, “It’s amazing how subjective those things are.”  My very strong feeling is that “A Penny for Your Thoughts” should have earned an Oscar nomination for Guest and his co-writer Michael McKean.

     The idea of subjectivity is a good place to conclude this piece, because what one finds comforting is itself quite subjective.  Discussing this topic with crew members in Ohio last week (I'm editing here), The Shawshank Redemption was named by many as a comfort movie.  So when we discovered that Mansfield Prison, where that film was shot, was a short drive away, we took a field trip to the facility.  Disconnected from the motion picture, conditions were as far as one could imagine from comfort  But movies are magical.  Watching Shawshank, one is far more deeply affected by the comradery and the triumph of the “good guys” than by the brutality of penitentiary life. 

     

HAPPY 70th BIRTHDAY, BOB DYLAN

May 24, 2011

     A busker in Central Park named Peter Ferarra used to introduce “Like A Rolling Stone” by saying, “This should be our national anthem.”  If Peter was right, and I think he was, then May 24th, Bob Dylan’s birthday, should be a national holiday.  He is, after all, a national treasure. 

      It’s not just that Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters of the last century and an astonishing rock performer, he’s a true Renaissance Man.  Accepted even in adademic circles as a genuine poet (“Boots of Spanish Leather” appears in The Norton Anthology of Poetry), Dylan is also a painter, a novelist (Tarantula), a memoirist (Chronicles, Volume One), a peerless radio host, a delightful actor and a film composer and director.

     Quite a few Bob Dylan songs show him to be a film buff as well.  In “Desolation Row” he pays homage to Bette Davis, in “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” he mentions a “a movie called Gunga Din,” and it’s said that “The Might Quinn” is about Anthony Quinn in The Savage Innocents.  

     There’s also a scene in the first film Dylan directed, Eat the Document (1972), in which he reels off movie star names like Tyrone Power, Ronald Coleman and J. Carroll Naish.  Document is a cinema verite feature photographed by D.A. Pennebaker (director of Dont Look Back, which itself is a record of Dylan’s1965 tour of England).  Dylan’s piece captures more surreal aspects of touring than Pennebaker’s.  Its “pet groomer” scene, in which the director/star turns dozens of words into abstract found objects and quickly reassembles them into a surreal word collage, is simply astonishing.   

     In both Eat the Document and Dont Look Back, the folk rock icon seems to be acting, creating a character called Bob Dylan.  Viewed in the context of film history, his performances belie the commonly accepted notion that portable 16mm. cameras were so unobtrusive that they were unperceived by documentary subjects.  On the contrary, Dylan seems hyper-aware that he was being filmed.  (Today -- with literally pocket-sized cameras like the Canon 7D -- such a view of 1960’s verite films, made with noisy 30 pound rigs, seems almost nonsensical.)

     Even though Bob Dylan documentaries were shown in commercial movie houses when they were released, they are decidedly not “Hollywood” pictures.  And Dylan’s other directing project, Renaldo and Clara (1978), is equally “art house;” it mixes concert footage and a dreamlike narrative, both performed by Dylan in white face make-up.  

     Of course, Dylan never intended his films to be “mainstream.”  His neighbors, when he lived at the Chelsea hotel in the 1960’s, included such underground experimental cinema luminaries as Taylor Meade (Lonesome Cowboys) and Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures).  If Dylan-directed movies have been more widely seen than those of visionary avant garde filmmakers, it’s simply because he’s a superstar. 

     But Dylan has, of course, toiled in the trenches of Hollywood.  “Rainy Day Women” is used to great advantage in Forest Gump (1994).  And “Things Have Changed,” written for Curtis Hanson’s “Wonder Boys,” won an Academy Award for Best Original Song (2000).

     Dylan’s most ambitious Hollywood venture, though, was his stint as both actor in and composer of the score for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).  His highly stylized portrayal of a character named Alias is -- at least for his fans -- one of the best things about the movie.  His Tex-Mex tinged score is extremely moving and the song “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” which he wrote for the film, is nothing less than classic.

       Indeed, Bob Dylan’s singing and songwriting do come to mind first when thinking about his contributions to film.  In addition to all of the above, for example, songs are the centerpiece of Martin Scorcese’s PBS special “No Direction Home” (2005).  In fact, Scorcese seems to build the entire first half of the show around a performance of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

     Which brings us full circle.  I may be going out on a limb here, but I believe that “Like a Rolling Stone” is important for filmmakers, because the song is rife with editing lessons.  Its unforgettable four verses and choruss are, according to Dylan, cut down from the 50 (!) he originally wrote.  The lesson:  cut ruthlessly.

     On the other hand, the song’s 6 minute duration is an object lesson in not cutting, and in not compromising.  When Columbia released it as a single in 1965, radio stations wouldn’t play any record longer than 3 minutes.  A year earlier, AM disc jockeys had chopped The Rolling Stones’ 3 verse hit, “Satisfaction,” by a full third to make it fit the format.  And two years later, they deleted 4 minutes of virtuoso playing on the Doors’ “Light My Fire” for the same reason.  But in 1965 Bob Dylan and Columbia Records stood their ground.   The artist wanted a record out there that he’d listen to, and that was unlike any he’d ever heard; only with the equivalent of “final cut” could he have gotten that.

     

     So today, we celebrate a milestone for an uncompromising artist from whom we’ve all learned and by whom we’ve all been entertained and uplifted.  Happy 70th Birthday, Bob Dylan!